by: Dr. Clarence Spigner | Back to Blog index...

Historian John Hoberman’s, Darwin’s Athletes: How Sport has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race (Mariner Book, 1997), provided a much needed indictment of race and racism in the big-money American sports. Dave Zirin, a sports scholar we are unlikely to hear on National Public Radio, has also deconstructed the racial mythology in sports by articulating a capitalistic fixation on African Americans athletes.

The 1994 documentary, Hoop Dreams, was an extraordinary film that followed two African American youths from the mean streets of Chicago on a one-way trip from playing high school basketball to the pursuit of college scholarships to be used as stepping stones to high-paying professional NBA contracts.  They did not make it.  The fault of not focusing instead on academics was laid to the society at large.  Hoop Dreams reflected the societal and institutional racism that can bend young minds to aspire to the limited careers and positions in sports.  And yet, this crucial message, having so well been articulated by historian John Hoberman; sports writer David Zirin; and occasionally heard from Frank Deford, a sport writer for Sports Illustrated and commentator on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, have been countered in a blitz of pro-sports propaganda films straight out of the Hollywood dream factory.  

He Got Game (1998) was among the first basketball film to react to Hoop Dreams by emphasizing academics, but not over the significance of the sport itself. Another movie, Love and Basketball (2000), introduced gender-equity and romance by featuring two middle-class African American youths who seemingly took to the game the way their white counterparts took to skiing.  Finding Forrester (2000) was basketball-themed as well and thankfully flipped the dumb-jock stereotype by featuring a brilliant black teenager more interested in writing but getting more attention by playing basketball. Finding Forrester resorted to that old classic mainstay of black youths needing a white father-figure.  Coach Carter (2005) was the worst of the lot. Supposedly based on a true story, this self-aggrandizing high school basketball film did little to challenge the racial status-quo.  This self-serving film essentially exploited the dominance of basketball in black inner-city high schools.  At the professional level, Glory Road (2006) presented a revisionary view of a white coach-as-Christ-figure leading an integrated team of basketball players across a River Jordan in the segregated South.     

Not since the romantic comedy, Trouble along the Way (1953) has a popular film dealt seriously with the ethical contradictions of intercollegiate football.   The Program (1993) however, was exceptional with its pull-no-punches expose of college football.  The film presented the incredible pressures brought to the backs of coaches and players.  Similarly, Any Given Sunday (1999), a bit too razzle-dazzle in its editing, nonetheless was effective in its depiction of the gladiator mentality in professional football.  But these needed messages brutality and sexuality was lost in Remember the Titans (2000), another over-rated high-school football film supposedly based on a true story.  Remember the Titans had the oldest looking “teenagers” you will ever see, and also preached in sanctimonious fashion about how racial harmony can be achieved when everyone has the same goal, literally.    

But none came close to the hypocrisy of Friday Night Lights (2004).  Based on H.G. Bissinger’s excellent book, Friday Night Lights rightfully articulated how high school football had become a virtual religion in an economically depressed Southern back-water.  The obscenity of Friday Night Lights, the movie, was that it intentionally left out the region’s racism so painfully expressed in the book. Bissinger was very explicit about how the “n” word came as easily from the mouths of red-necks as did sweat from the brow of slaves.  Instead, Friday Night Lights resorted to a Rocky mentality by depicting the rival African American teams as if they were the Affirmative Action enemies of poor whites.     

More and more basketball and football films have and will continue to emerge from the Hollywood dream factory.  But the ultimate nightmare is that these images are used as cinematic propaganda to rationalize the existence of societal and institutional racism in sports.   

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